Catalysts provide a vital mechanism for facilitating modern industrial-scale chemical production. This is particularly true in petrochemical processing and organics. The changing demand for specific hydrocarbon products as well as the changing oil feedstock due to shale oil production competition with traditional crude oil.
Ideally, catalysts facilitate chemical transformations with a certain selectivity for catalyzed reactions (and end products) as well as a stability or useful lifetime as the catalyst is fouled or deactivated. For alkane dehydrogenation, platinum and platinum group materials have long been used as catalysts. However, due to the environment under which the dehydrogenation takes place, platinum catalysts have exhibited a number of problems including poor stability. While high-surface-area substrates have been utilized with platinum catalysts, such as silica and alumina, such catalysts suffer from deactivation due to active-site sintering.
There is a need for a platinum group catalyst that utilizes high-surface area substrates while maintaining catalyst activity, selectivity and stability.